ECO SCHOOL#IT IS TIME TO HELP

De La Salle College has in the past years given great importance to environmental education so much so that staff has included environmental education in their teaching. Environment education is one of the three pillars on which NGO is built. Furthermore administration strongly believe that environmental education is the very essence for a mentality change in the Maltese Islands towards environmental awareness and improvement .Thus, this mentality has to start with passing on certain values to all our pupils.
Our school also has the opportunity of being awarded for our efforts by having the honour of getting the Green Flag award for the second time.
This year the Eco Skola team has set up an action plan addressing Water as the main issue. Some main points were

The major stimulus to launch the project "It´s time to help” (ITTH) was the idea of international cooperation among European schools involved in Eco-School Programme. All these schools have realized the methodology concept of “Seven Steps of Eco-School”; however, each eco-school under the conditions of their country and their climate regions. The ITTH project joins the pupils at the age of 11 to 16 together with their teachers from the Czech Republic, Latvia, Germany, Finland, Malta and Portugal and it enables not only to establish and develop friendship among the pupils and the teachers and increase their interest in culture, traditions and environment of the countries, but also to compare their previous work in the field of ecology, share their experience and ideas and also look for effective treatment of selected topics, such as water, energy, waste, bio-diversity, economical consumer and school environment from different points of view.

The aims of the ITTH project are to facilitate interconnection of formal and informal learning and involve in the project work excellent and active pupils together with the pupils who face educational difficulties, cultural differences or economic and social obstacles. The project involves about one thousand of the pupils and teachers.

The project work is divided into three main parts: preparation, realisation and finalization. Within the preparation of the project each school prepares the websites, the project logo, communicates with a local/regional eco-centre and deputies, organises the regular school-team meetings, does their school analyses on the fixed eco-topics and informs the public about the scheduled events and activities. During the project realisation the host school organises the meeting and the partner school take part in the meeting where they work in a team, participate in/observe lessons, attend workshops, compare prepared analyses, suggest the solution to eco-problems of the partner schools, exchange their experience and ideas, gather materials for booklets and evaluate actual work. The project idea and output dissemination is done regularly before and after each meeting. Within the finalization both the pupils and the teachers evaluate the project websites, cooperation and communication among the partners. They evaluate each-partner-school´s outputs and results, school performance of tasks and plan further cooperation and project outcomes and results dissemination.

The ITTH project contributes to cross-curricular education and thus enables the pupils to develop talent, knowledge, skills and competences in different spheres. The teachers thanks to the cooperation with their foreign partners have a considerable opportunity to share experience, teaching ideas and procedures.

Through the ITTH project the pupils and the teachers, as well, become aware of their own responsibility for the environment. The ITTH project leads the pupils, teachers and public to realize that sustainable growth is the only way how to save the Earth for future generations. The project motivates them for further active participation in everyday life and foreign language learning and also extends their area of competences and thus contributes to their further career orientation.